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Distributional analysis. Morphemic analysis. IC-analysisBy the term distributionwe understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.). In other words by this term we understand the position which lexical units occupy or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech. The distributionof a unit is the sum total of all its environments. The environment of a unit may be either “right” or “left”. It is readily observed that a certain component of the word-meaning is described when the word is identified distributionally. The distributional analysisis used to fix and study the units of language in relation to their contextual environments, i. e. adjoining elements in the text. In the distributional analysis at the morphemic level, phonemic distribution of morphemes and morphemic distribution of morphemes are discriminated. The study is conducted in two stages. At the first stage, the analyzed text is divided into recurrent segments consisting of phonemes. These segments are called “morphs”. At the second stage, the environmental features of the morphs are established and the corresponding identifications are effected. Three main types of distribution are discriminated: contrastive, noncontrastive and complementary. Contrastive and non-contrastive distribution concern identical environments of different morphs. The morphs are said to be in contrastive distributionif their meanings are different. Such morphs constitute different morphemes (eg. played, playing). The morphs are said to be in noncontrastive distributionif their meaning is the same. Such morphs constitute “free alternants”, or “free variants” of the same morpheme (eg. burned, burnt). Complementary distributionconcerns different environments of formally different morphs which are united by the same meaning. If two or more morphs have the same meaning and the difference in their form is explained by different environments, these morphs are said to be in complementary distribution and considered the allomorphs of the same morpheme (eg. desks, girls, glasses). The morphemic analysis(sometimes also called morphological) is one of possible methods of analyzing word structure along with the word-building analysis. The morphemic analysis is a process of singling out morphs in a word and stating their meaning. To state the borders between morphemes correctly, it is necessary to study the word in a row of words which are structurally similar (words with the same root and suffixes). The procedure of the morphemic analysis states the morphemic structure of the word. The procedure consists of two operations: 1) the stem is separated from the inflection by means of comparing wordforms of the word; 2) relations between morphemes in the stem are stated by means of comparing cognate words. The morphemic analysis based on the distributional analysis gave rise to such notions as morph, allomorph, morpheme, etc. The theory of Immediate Constituents (IC)was originally elaborated as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. It was discovered that combinations of such units are usually structured into hierarchically arranged sets of binary constructions. For example in the wordgroup a black dress in severe stylewe do not relate ato black, black to dress, dressto in,etc. but set up a structure which may be represented as a black dress / in severe style.Thus the fundamental aim of IC analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into two maximally independent sequences or ICs thus revealing the hierarchical structure of this set. Successive segmentation results in Ultimate Constituents (UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units having both sound-form and meaning. The Ultimate Constituents of the word13 group analysed above are: a| black | dress | in | severe| style.The meaning of the sentence, word-group, etc. and the IC binary segmentation are interdependent. For example, fat major’s wifemay mean that either ‘the major is fat’ or ‘his wife is fat’. The former semantic interpretation presupposes the IC analysis into fat major’s | wife,whereas the latter reflects a different segmentation into IC’s and namely fat| major’s wife. Lecture 2 Date: 2015-12-17; view: 7541
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